Breadcrumb

Thoughts on Marxism, Theorising Sexuality and Sexual Politics

This archive piece from 2002 attempts to frame a Marxist agenda in the study of sexuality at the start of the 21st Century.

Marxism might be regarded as having been conspicuously absent from the development of the study of sexuality and the politics of sexual identity and orientation since the 1970’s.[1] Central political influences and debates revolve around a diverse range of sociologists, historians and cultural theorists who take different positions in contemporary debates between queer theory and social constructionism as to the social and cultural construction of sexuality in society. Against other domains of theorising about society, where Marxism’s focus on the structural analysis of social (class) relations, the material conditions of relations of production, processes of commodification and capitalist exploitation of labour value and the politics of ideological and repressive power as the basis for class oppression and alienation, can claim to have shaped the contours for radical theorising, this absence is both remarkable and questionable.

Indeed, when discussion focuses on pathologies, discrimination, oppression and alienation on the basis of sexuality, sexual identity and sexual diversity, Marxist analyses have been discounted or received a hostile reception. Simon Edge (1995:3-4), for example, has observed:

….the Marxist tradition has no more influence on the modern lesbian and gay movement than it deserves. Gay Marxists who are encouraged by their straight comrades and leaders to shun the very real gains won since the GLF by an autonomous lesbian and gay movement are being seduced into an essentially heterosexist project where gay issues are sidelined.[2]

This brief meditation argues that Marxist categories and ideas have a critical part to play in analysing the social construction of sexuality and developing a progressive sexual politics — a politics of sexual diversity and citizenship rights that aspires to be more than the limited possibilities arising from liberal rights, minority identity politics or queer rhetoric. Whilst any argument for a Marxist politics of sexuality is stretching the argument, Marxist concepts and ideas have a crucial part to play in conceiving sexual rights, emancipation and justice. It will do this by recalling that Marxists have made key contributions to how sexuality is currently theorised, and sketching how Marxism can continue to make a significant and valuable contribution to the theorising of sexuality and sexual politics into the 21st Century.

Section I

Three factors account for the estrangement of Marxism and the subject — theoretical and political — of sexuality. First, the study of sexuality as a social subject has its roots in three intellectual traditions that have developed antagonistically to Marxist thought: gendered theory, post-structuralist philosophy and post-modern theory, and sociological theory.[3] Whilst undoubtedly there are thinkers who have addressed issues of sexuality who house themselves within the Marxist tradition — Bernstein, Kollontai, Reich and Fromm are examples — their work does not constitute a coherent or sustained engagement with sexual orientation and difference.[4] Sexuality is largely absent as a subject from Marxist discourse until the 1960’s, when it emerges alongside the development of cultural politics and social movements, and is more evident in the work of Marcuse and 1960’s Marxists.[5]

Second, Marxism has been challenged by feminists, for failing to adequately theorise identity as distinct and autonomous from class and the social relations of production. Radical feminists such Alison Jagger have argued that Marxism’s class determinant approach undertheorised the distinctiveness of male power and oppression [6]. Socialist feminist critiques mitigated this problem by their dual-systems approach to theorising capitalist patriarchy, but the problem of whether class or gender determines patterns of oppression remains [7]. This encouraged hostility or indifference to Marxism amongst those who extended work on gender into studies on sexuality.[8] The few avowedly Marxist attempts to address issues of sexuality have been crude and tied into the broad remit of Marxist analyses of gendered relations[9].

Finally, Marxist theory and politics have been challenged by post-structuralist, post-modern and post-Marxist critiques that argue that Marxist conceptual categories and analytical approaches to the critique of 'late' or post-modernity are dated, essentialist, overdeterministic, and no longer have legitimacy[10]. Such critiques have moved away from monocausal conceptions of social oppression, opening a distance from Marxist theory. The development of theoretical and political interest in the subject of sexuality belongs within this trend in social theory — post-structuralist philosophy and post-modern theory — and its context of scepticism about Marxist theory. The theoretical questions that are at the centre of such approaches to the study of sexuality — essentialism versus constructionism, gender determination versus the specificity of oppression, alienation and discrimination of the basis of sexuality, identity versus queer strategies for liberation — have been occupied by protagonists who absent Marxism from these questions altogether.[11] Thus, Marxism offers relatively little that speaks to or connects with the dominant frameworks of studies in sexualities.

Writings on the politics of sexuality have both used elements of the language of Marxism as a metaphor in strategies for sexual rights and social justice, and been simultaneously openly hostile to Marxist theory and politics as 'part of the problem'. Much of this language is the language of Gramscian analyses — ideology, culture and hegemony — which is itself problematised by its appropriation by post-Marxists and those following the 'cultural turn' in social analyses.[12] Those who do adopt an approach informed by Marxist concepts and ideas, such as David Evans, tend to emphasise the constraints to sexual citizenship under capitalism, rather than the scope for sexual citizenship, equality and justice through class struggle[13]. Nicola Field, alternately, argues class solidarity as a basis for refusing and politicising struggles for equality and justice but from a position where common interests and central struggles are articulated firmly though a class analysis.[14] Both approaches are minority voices in the broader discussion of sexual politics and citizenship, and prompt an inevitable questioning as to what contribution Marxist theories and categories can make to the analysis of sexual identity, relations, behaviour, regulation and difference. Is there scope for a meaningful contribution by Marxism to studies of the social emancipation of sexual diversity?

Those who have defended arguments around determination, essentialism and causality in social change have argued that feminism provided the best explanatory framework for sexual oppression. Whereas Marxists have constructed their critique upon class and capitalism, feminists have recognised the importance of identity, a more discursive critique of private and public divides and categories and the importance of social and cultural basis for gendered and sexual oppression. The critique of patriarchy and masculinity has been extrapolated to deal with issues of diverse sexual identities, relations and behaviour. Whereas Marxists have dealt with these sorts of issues in a largely functional (to capitalism or the maintenance of class divisions) fashion, feminisms provided a more critical framework for exploring how pathologies developed according to the particular trajectory of patriarchy, heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity[15]. Whereas Marxists have discussed sex in respect of the role of intimate relations in the reproduction of both labour and social relations, feminists addressed more directly issues of identity, relations, behaviour and central concepts of love and desire (or their 'illusion') and pleasure and desire in the organisation of gendered society. Feminisms, then, both seemed to allow a greater congruency and more affinity with the study of sexuality than Marxism, whilst at the same time showing in its development the capacity to stretch towards multi-variable models of causality and change, though queer theory emerged from a critique of feminism that claimed feminists could not move beyond their heteronormativity.[16]

Whether from the social constructionist, sociological or symbolic interactionist analyses of the construction of sexual identities and relations, studies of diverse sexualities centred on the social production of categories discursively rather than determinantly through essential causality and power of the social relations of production. Gagnon and Simon, Plummer, McIntosh, Weeks, Altman, Mort, and Foucault, best represent these analyses[17]. They explored the contingent production of oppressive discourses, institutions and orthodoxies through the particular historic development of moral, medical, legal, political and cultural discourses, which were elaborated and explored in their contradictory, contingent and heterodox forms rather than reduced to a particular and singular production, pattern and development of oppression. Queer theory, and notably the work of Butler, Seidman, Phelan and Sedgwick move even further from a Marxist frame of reference[18].

Section II

Now, is there a contribution that Marxists can make to the contemporary debates around sexualities? The starting point of a response involves three general observations.

First, there is a tendency for critiques of Marxism to adopt a rather singular and sometimes misrepresentative version of Marxism. According to Norman Geras the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, some contemporary critiques of Marxism, presents: “[…] an impoverishing caricature of the Marxist tradition […]. The account they render of some key Marxist thinkers is a travesty of the tradition, reducing and devaluing it and distorting many of its ideas.”[19]

Second, where there are more authentic engagements with Marxism, the emphasis is on the 'mainstream' political economy approach associated with Marx's mature writings. Marxism is, however, a broad church, and has within it strands of thinking — represented best in the work of critical theorists such as Horkheimer and Adorno, and later Habermas, and theorists of culture, notably Gramsci — that allow for a more sophisticated theorising of questions of identity and social relations. This is not, however, to suggest that Marxists use only the insights of critical theory and Gramscian cultural analyses to interrogate the issue of sexuality, as political economy has significant insights to offer, evidenced in the work already cited from Evans and Field.

Finally, whilst there is undoubtedly an epistemic and methodological gap between Marxism and contemporary post-structuralist influenced positions, it is not to say that constructive dialogues cannot be forged between them. Foucault was a leading influence to the development of a social constructionist approach to studying sexuality and is often represented as an avowed critic of Marxism. Yet there is evidence that this opposition obscures some points of intersection. In later writings, Foucault distinguishes his criticism of Marxism as quite specifically aimed at the narrowly conceived political economy critique offered as a classical analysis and associated with the French Communist Party, and expresses regret at not engaging with the insights of critical theory, even with some disagreement. [20] More recently, the dialogue between Judith Butler, the doyenne of queer theory, and Nancy Fraser in which Butler responds to critiques of queer theory by engaging with a quite functionalist analysis of gender aligned to Engels, points to a continuing juxtaposition of analysing identity with Marxist ideas. [21]

Critical theorists had already recognised sexuality as a field of conflict and subjugation, most notably in the work of Herbert Marcuse, who theorised sexual subordination and control as a feature of the necessary imperatives of capitalist society. [22] The radicalism of the 1960's encouraged the convergence of sexual politics as an agenda driven largely by the left — whether gay and lesbian —or as a more general issue of sexual emancipation[23]. Typical of this is the Red Collective critique of sexual politics, the family and Freudian psychoanalysis, where an overarching problem in creating a sexual politics

is that perceptions and feelings we have feel natural, human, even eternal, as all capitalist relations do […]. The oppressing structures of monogamy and the various forms of permissiveness within which these personal feelings are felt, make it impossible to become conscious of their specificity (their particularity to this social structure) [...].[24]

This is a classical call for a critical rejection of the prevailing ideological (Freud) and institutional (family) construction of sexuality under capitalism. It extends a classical Marxist analysis to sites of ideological domination, its construction of a false consciousness based upon these sites and their immediate alternates (family against permissiveness), and the obscuring of social relations from relations of production. Although gay groups and other radical political movements influenced by Marxism were somewhat aligned to Marxist analyses, Gay Left Collective reflected the way in which the passing of the 'moment' of late 1960's radicalism led to an attempt by Gay activists and theorists to redefine a 'Gay Left'[25].

The best Marxist critiques of the 1990's have explored the political economy of rights discourse and the production of cultural and geographical space for diverse sexualities. David Evans, whose work has already been discussed, provides an extensive critique of the driving force of commodification in the development of lesbian and gay culture and the weakness of rights discourse, absence of economic rights and limits to legal, political and social rights within the construction of sexual citizenship. Evans is particularly interesting where his essays establish a materialist critique based upon political economy with a critique of legal, political and social discourses of prejudice produced by institutions and around particular actions within no singularly determinant logic of class suppression or capitalist interests.[26] Evans' analysis reasserts the link between political economy and sexuality within a framework that allows for the relative autonomy of state institutions and social actors in the production of particular discourses of pathology and prejudice against diverse sexualities. Evans identifies Foucault, Weeks and Altman amongst others as important in the development of this materialist critique, but Marxist readers might see Poulantzas and even Althusser as equally influential.

John Binnie and the essays in Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed’s “Homoeconomics” extend this analysis of how consumption and commodification defines and characterises the public and cultural space occupied by people of diverse sexualities.[27] The impact of such analyses is to refocus analysis not upon the development of such space and 'rights', but the nature and character, and for example, exclusivity (such as the 'scene' for older lesbians and gays) of this space.

Nicola Field – again already discussed above — provides a more trenchant extension of this approach from a far more overtly Marxist position, rejecting the lifestyle markets and identity politics, making a critical analysis of how the scope and limits to the space afforded people of diverse sexualities is determined by the market and the state. She concludes, and it is worth restating this Marxist position at length:

The factor which holds all reformist strategies back is the way that they define and ringfence supposedly “lesbian and gay issues” as though lesbian and gay oppression simply effects those who have same-sex relationships. The reality is that gay oppression is a weapon of social control. We cannot hope to bring about real change for gay people whilst the system which causes gay oppression remains in place. [...]

All “lesbian and gay issues” are rooted in the politics of class struggle. When ambitious, bourgeois “community leaders” seek to divorce these issues from wider social and political concerns the lesbian and gay movement becomes atrophied. Being able to rework and reassess the reformist gay rights programme in the context of defending working class interests is a vital step in breaking away from the frustrations and divisions of identity politics. It enables us to see how the issues which are so close to gay people are of equal importance to the rest of society. Far from losing our identity in this process, we can begin to recognise actual and potential allies all around us.

Do we just want the same poverty traps and institutions? Seeking assimilation into what is perceived as “straight privilege” has led many gay activists to confuse equal rights with equal oppression. [28]

Section III

Marxist theory and politics does have a contribution to make to the theory and politics of sexuality. The contribution lies with the critical value of Marxist categories to the analysis of sexual orientation and social values, rights and justice in contemporary societies. The summary above stresses both the categorical and epistemic difficulties of such an issue and some of the possibilities of such an analysis. The menu of four areas that follows builds upon those possibilities, in embryonic form.

First, the Marxist influenced critical focus on culture, commodification and consumption is undoubtedly a trenchant and fertile field for critiquing the contemporary discourses of sexual rights, justice and space in contemporary societies. It critically engages with and exposes the weaknesses of contemporary discourses of sexual citizenship: identity politics and the problem of particularist political struggles, cultural and social safe space as zones of consumption, and the poverty of rights discourse as a driving force behind struggles for equality and social justice. What Marxism does is to explore and critically challenge the nature of progress towards sexual rights, equality and justice through intrinsically unequal, unjust and ruling institutions and orthodoxies, and thus provides a basis for a structural analysis of the shortcomings of the reformist agenda. Rather than exploring the development of cultural and social safe space it has the tools to identify its character and causality, and in the case of the rise of 'Gay-friendly' zones of consumption, show the strengths of not disregarding political economy. Hence, the focus of Marxism might not necessarily directly address issues of identity and sexual relations and behaviour but it does have considerable explanatory power in addressing the context within which they pervade public space, the forms in which this space and the institutions and orthodoxies that prevail take, and the causality and rationality behind their activity. Other examples of the power of this analysis might be the commodified centre of diverse sexualities such as sado-masochism, and the way in which cultural codes of identification and participation in the 'scene' are themselves structured through commodification.

Second, Marxists could more broadly provide a critical framework for understanding sexuality within a materialist conception of history. The centring of sexuality around discourse and narratives in contemporary theory, and queer theory and attendant post-modern 'imaginaries' such as 'genderfuck' tends to omit or downgrade the physicality, as well as the discursiveness of sexuality. [29] There might be a useful agenda for analysis in using categories of property, ownership and labour. Also, it might be fruitful to conceive the body within a materialist conception of the world that avoided Feuerbachian mechanical materialism but equally does not represent sexuality as a 'politics of mind' that is purely constructed on language and cultural representation. [30]

This leads to a third point, that the range and depth of Marxist theory has yet to be utilised in interrogating and opening fertile ground for studies of sexuality. Critical theory and more aesthetically informed Marxism, such as that of Jürgen Habermas for example, engaging universal pragmatics and systematically distorted communication, offers more than is presently taken in explaining the nature, origins and development of discourses of prejudice and pathology and the resistance to them.[31] Hence, there are rich veins of Marxist scholarship insufficiently mined to make develop critical perspectives on sexuality.

Finally, Marxists still have something to say about emancipation and the politics of struggle. Hegemony, however abused a concept, remains a fruitful conceptual framework for understanding both strategies for domination and strategies for resistance. Marxists do have an analysis of the agenda of sexual politics. Marxist analyses would explore tensions between gays, lesbians and other sexualities that are typified in the struggles over the designation and 'ownership' of Pride, and the separateness of cultural zones of space for diverse sexualities that encourages separation of identities. The absence of effective strategies for collective solidarity, and the prejudice and discrimination within diverse sexualities, are weaknesses in sexual political agendas. Marxists could provide the basis for critiques of the way in which many sexual rights groups have come to work with intrinsically unequal and discriminatory political reformist agendas and accept a piecemeal gradualism underpinned by toleration and not rights. Marxist critiques of post-modernism and post-structuralism, could usefully be extrapolated onto queer theory to expose its limited class-laden scope for a politics of transgression. Theorising the struggle for rights, liberties and social justice for people of diverse sexualities is strengthened by the use of a materialist conception of the history of sexual politics, a politics of collective solidarity, and an understanding of the hegemonic power of sexual intolerance.

This diagnostic power, however, is not accompanied by convincing prognostic analyses. Wedding the fortunes of sexual politics to class struggles has an uncomfortable balance of priorities. The privileging of class concepts over identity concepts requires a greater level of theorising to explain how the discursive relationship between the two becomes more than class determined. Post-Marxists attempt to offer a way around the problem of determination through their rejection of it and their replacement of social categories with political categories, such as radical democracy superseding class or identity as the basis of emancipation. This, however, involves exchanging the epistemic determinism of material existence in class struggle with the epistemic problems of radical democracy, which provides a formal model for political democracy that treats all identities and groups equally, without necessarily explaining how prejudice, pathology and characterisations of difference and deviance are resolved. The radical democrat 'language game' presumes a willingness to resolve conflict and reconcile difference rather than a commitment to conflict and conquer. For example, Escoffier argues the need for the lesbian and gay movement to ally with progressive religious forces and other radical communities to construct a persuasive counter-hegemonic project against the radical right, without exploring the essential heterosexism and reserved but nevertheless ingrained prejudice of even the moderate church. [32] The importance of maintaining a liberal permissiveness in politics seems to require the building of a consensus that would tolerate gays and lesbians, rather than challenge ingrained prejudice and engage in transforming or breaking down the church. The balance of compromise becomes ignoring the problem of prejudice as long as it does not interfere with formal democratic rights and processes, a rather liberal approach that leaves diverse sexualities at the margin and subject to social and cultural pathologies outside the formal democratic arena.

Marxism offers the prospect of a significant contribution to a radical politics of sexual diversity that critiques both the oppressive nature of heterosexist and homophobic society and the problems of effecting sexual freedom, equality, rights, diversity and justice. For it to do so, however, Marxist analyses may have to become 'sexualised' — sensitised to what theorists and analysts of sexuality have conceived about sexual identity, relations and behaviour that is at odds with Marxist accounts of social life. At present, it would be folly to talk of a persuasive Marxist analysis of sexuality in contemporary society, but it is also folly to rehearse the oft-quoted and poorly constructed dismissal of Marxism within the writings of those involved in the study of sexuality. That is not to say, however, that some significant insight is not possible, desirable and potentially mutually constructive for both students of sexuality and students of Marxism.

[1] Paul Reynolds is Reader in Sociology and Social Philosophy at Edge Hill University, and is a long standing member of the Historical Materialism Editorial Board. He is also co-convenor of the International Network for Sexual Ethics and Politics (INSEP) and co-editor in chief of its journal. This archive piece dates back to 2002, and two very similar versions appeared as follows (This is the 2004 version): Reynolds P (2004) 'Marxism and the Social Construction of Sexuality. Some Considerations and a Research Agenda' in Hekma, G (ed.) Past and Present of Radical Sexual Politics. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, pp185 - 193; Reynolds P (2002) ‘Some Thoughts on Marxism and the Social Construction of Sexuality’ in Pasteur, P., Neideracher. S.and Mesner, M. (eds.) Sexualitat, Unterschichtenmilieus und ArbeiterInnenbewegung, Wien: Akademische Verlagsanstalt p 27-38 Both publications were relatively low circulation, and the queer Marxist agenda may well have developed, but this paper might best be described as sketching the barest bones of a larger project on Marxism and sexuality. Previous versions of this paper were given to the Political Studies Association Marxism Specialist Group Conference at the University of Sussex, UK in 1999 and the Sexuality, the Working Classes and Labour Conference at the University of Linz, Austria, in 2002, and various other seminars — thanks to participants at both conferences for their comments.

[3] This does not discount the importance of, for example, sexological and psychological theories, but draws the terrain of this paper as the study of sexuality as a social subject. For indicative examples of these approaches see, representatively, Sheila Jeffreys, Anti-Climax, London 1990, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (3 Volumes), Harmondsworth 1981, 1984a, 1984b, Ken Plummer (ed.), The making of the Modern Homosexual, London 1981, John Gagnon / William Simon, Sexual Conduct, Chicago 1973, Joseph Bristow, Sexuality, London 1997.

[9] For example, Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, London 1976, and Sheila Rowbotham / Lynne Segal / Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, London 1979.

[23] See for example, the essays by Birch, Thorneyscroft, Weeks and Sreeves, Cant, Otitoju and Shiers in Brian Cant / Steve Hemmings, Radical Records: Thirty Years of Lesbian and Gay History, London 1988.

[24] Red Collective, The Politics of Sexuality in Capitalism London 1978, 8.

[25] Gay left Collective (ed), Homosexuality, Power and Politics, London (undated). See particularly the essays by Weeks, Altman, Watney Birch and Derbyshire.

[32] Jeffrey Escoffier, 'Culture Wars and Identity Politics: The Religious Right and the Cultural Politics of Homosexuality’, in David Trend (ed.), Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State London 1996, 165–178.

Historical Materialism is a Marxist journal, appearing 4 times a year, based in London. Founded in 1997 it asserts that, not withstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. In our selection of material we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Marx demanded the 'Merciless criticism of everything that exists': for us that includes Marxism itself.